Bush Says Deadline Is Strict as Gore Seeks Tallying Standard

Published: November 20, 2000

TALLAHASSEE, Fla., Nov. 19 -- Lawyers for Gov. George W. Bush contended today that Florida law set a clear deadline of last Tuesday for counties to submit all vote tallies except those for overseas absentee ballots, and they asked the Florida Supreme Court to let the state reject any manual recounts conducted after that date.

In a 56-page brief that focused narrowly on the specific language of Florida's election statutes, Mr. Bush's legal team argued that the State Legislature had fully understood that a manual recount could take longer than the seven-day deadline and had nonetheless come down squarely on the side of a clear cutoff, one week after Election Day, at 5 p.m.

''If a county board believes that a manual recount is important to ensure an accurate vote count in a closely contested election, it has a statutory duty to appoint enough counting teams to get the job done by the deadline,'' said the Republican brief, submitted for a hearing by the court on Monday. ''If a board is unable or unwilling to do so, it should not exercise its unfettered discretion to embark on a manual recount.''

Much of the Republican case, in fact, is built on a contention that the Florida Legislature knew exactly what it was doing in enacting election laws that at times appear to conflict with one another, like the provisions requiring a tight deadline and allowing a manual recount, which is time-consuming and complex. Comparing the legislature to the ''framers of the Constitution,'' Mr. Bush's lawyers wrote, ''Surely the legislature would not have enacted two conflicting provisions at the same time.''

In their reply to the Bush brief a few hours later, lawyers for Vice President Al Gore said that an accurate determination of the voters' intent was more important than a ''hypertechnical compliance'' with a deadline in the law.

They also went a step further, asking the high court for the first time to set a firm standard for how a punch-card ballot should be examined to determine a voter's intent, suggesting that all marks and indentations on a ballot should be broadly interpreted as a vote.

Such a ruling by the Supreme Court could bring some uniformity to the hand counts now going on in three Florida counties, which have used differing standards to determine a vote.

On Friday, the high court, the only branch of state government dominated by appointees of Democratic governors, acted on its own authority to bar the Florida secretary of state, Katherine Harris, from certifying a final statewide vote tally this weekend, after overseas absentee ballots were counted. Those tallies tripled Mr. Bush's previous lead, to 930 votes out of about 6 million cast statewide.

Mr. Gore's lawyers have since asked the court to order Ms. Harris to include the results of manual recounts in three South Florida Democratic strongholds -- Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade Counties -- or at least to delay a final certification of the statewide vote until the recounts can be finished.

So far, the recounts have shown relatively modest gains for Mr. Gore.

With oral arguments set for 2 p.m. on Monday, to be carried live on national television, lawyers for both sides worked round the clock in borrowed offices here this weekend to marshal their arguments. A long encampment of television reporters and satellite trucks waited in the rain today outside the Supreme Court building behind the State Capitol.

In her own brief filed separately with the court today, Ms. Harris, a Republican who was co-chairwoman of Mr. Bush's state campaign here this year, struck a note of equanimity and tried to separate herself from the two partisan sides. Her lawyers even asked the court not to include her position on the Republican side, even though her arguments are very similar to those of Mr. Bush.

''The Democrats' perspective is that the election code has to be read as mandating that each voter's intent, irrespective of whether the voter has properly punched or marked his or her ballot, must take precedence over statutory deadlines, the constitutional construction of statutes, and the discretion and operative duties of executive officers,'' Ms. Harris wrote. ''The Republicans, not to be outdone, are complaining about procedures for manual recounting and the sanctity of the machine tabulation.''

''It is clear,'' Ms. Harris added, ''that for the Democrats and the Republicans, the object is to win, and that is understandable. The stakes are very high.''

The court had given each side an hour to make oral arguments on Monday, including Ms. Harris in the Republicans' hour. In a motion to the court, she asked that the two hours be divided in thirds, with each campaign and her office being given 40 minutes. Mr. Gore's lawyers swiftly objected that that would cost precious moments of oral argument, and the court denied her request.

Mr. Gore's lawyers argued that because of the combined length of the briefs filed by Mr. Bush and Ms. Harris, they needed more space to offer their own reply this afternoon, and filed a brief of 25 pages, 10 pages more than the 15-page limit the court had set. The court allowed the addition.